People move through the world making strange and confusing social signals at each other. I’m unable fully to comprehend them, but every once in a while I manage to imitate one of these signals in a timely and somewhat convincing manner. That feels like a big win, even though I never really know what the purpose of the exercise is.
22 responses to “Social Signals”
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This makes me curious, can you give an example of such a signal? 🙂
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The most recent is the situation with volunteering requirements at my daughter’s school. I was angry about the requirement until a reader of this blog kindly explained to me that the requirement is simply a way of social signaling that only a certain kind of parent is welcome at the school. This immediately reconciled me to the idea because it no longer seems arbitrary and stupid.
Another example is the obligatory round of complaining about the cluelessness and unhelpfulness of the husbands, in which female groups and friend circles engage with ritualistic frequency. I find this ritual to be so annoying and uncomfortable that I’m routinely ejected from any female group to which I try to attach myself. I understand that this is also a form of social signaling, but I haven’t been able to reconcile myself to it because I don’t fully understand its meaning.
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Hmmm, Kid, do you ever consider that you may be instinctively rejecting the negative behaviors common amongst the women in the USSR of your early childhood ;-D
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LOL, could it just be women heard “from each according to his ability, to each according to
hisher need” while men decided “they pretend to pay us, so we pretend to work” ;-DLikeLike
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“making strange and confusing social signals at each other”
Two things…
First – look inside a machine, maybe your printer, maybe a watch… see all the weirdly placed things and features that seem to serve no purpose? They either served some purpose to the designer (or maybe are leftovers that served a purpose once but were kept in the design for some reason).
Second – look at an Orthodox church service (preferably in Europe). I remember watching some holiday service (maybe Easter) on TV from Moldova (formerly had a Moldovan channel) and it was… very confusing. Priests (there seemed to be several involved) going back and forth in different places, sometimes changing robes, sometimes spinning in place and saying prayers of different lengths at different times with different priests and… others that maybe were priests or something different doing similar chores. It was fascinating and I didn’t understand any of it, yet every movement/robe change/prayer probably has some purpose within the rite.
You don’t need to understand all social signals, some serve purposes now and some served purposes at one time and now hang around like a party guest that just. wont’. leave. It’s enough to learn to recognize ‘aha! a social signal that serves some purpose’ and maybe then ask ‘should I learn how to interact with it or just go my merry way?’
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I am resigned to the reality that I will miss most signals, misread others, and in turn do a poor job of obligatory signaling myself. There is no place in any (particularly female) social hierarchy for me. But I hold to the belief that as long as I deal honestly, show up, and wash the dishes, nobody will kick me out. So far so good.
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“resigned to the reality that I will miss most signals”
If you enjoy puzzles have you ever considered treating social signals as puzzles? A lot of my background amounts to taking in data and solving for figuring out how a system works. If you have the right kind of mindset/mentality it can make things a lot easier.
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Yes, and I do, when the social obstacle is keeping me from an important goal, like being a part of my church community, or my kids having friends. Ultimately, it’s a problem of bandwidth. Solving these puzzles is a lot of effort, often very stressful, and it’s only worth putting in that effort where there is a tangible payoff that aligns with more important goals. Otherwise: we try to meet the minimum standards for not offending everybody and trying to be generally useful. In a group of people (I hope) who aren’t total conniving bastards (and why do I want to be part of that group anyway?), this is generally tolerated.
My sister, who was considerably smarter and much more ambitious, successfully played the puzzle game for all it was worth. She was like some anime kid piloting around an amazing mecha normie suit. She studied Emily Post and Miss Manners and Cosmo and Vogue as if they were CIA manuals for her next assignment: infiltrate normie America. I watched her do it all through high school: she put hours a day, every day, into Project Be Normal. She studied her preppie classmates and practiced their mannerisms, their vocabulary, their hairstyles, their habits, until she could do it perfectly: performative normal. They were all just existing: she was performing. She succeeded amazingly. MBA, house in the suburbs, husband and 1.5 kids. Then died at 37.
I can’t help looking at that and just… what a waste. What was it all for?
So, yeah. The social puzzles aren’t an end in themselves for me. I don’t enjoy them. They’re a tremendous amount of effort. I engage with them when they become an obstacle, a toll-gate I have to pass to reach a more important goal. But the goal is always something else. If I tried for normal like my sister did, I’d only partially succeed (I lack her monumental drive), and it would suck up all the bandwidth I have– there’d be nothing left for my kids, music, art, books. My sister, my brilliant sister, wasted it at a job so she could come home, watch the Daily Show, go to bed, do it all again tomorrow, and never see her kid (who has no memory of her now). Not worth it. But hey she had a nice car and her hair was perfect.
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I feel this comment very deeply. It’s exactly as you say. I could throw myself into it and master it, at least to a degree. Project Be Normal is the perfect name for this. But if I were to do it, it would have to be at the expense of other things. I considered it. I dedicated a lot of thought to it. And I realize that I can’t. It’s a big sacrifice of time, effort, comfort, and things that I actually enjoy for a gain that doesn’t seem worth it.
Very, very sorry about your sister.
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“a problem of bandwidth. Solving these puzzles is a lot of effort, often very stressful, and it’s only worth putting in that effort”
I had in mind more the kind of effort you put into a crossword or a more casual long term collecting data points and then solving for X as it were.
For example, in my early days here lots of aspects of organizational life puzzled (occasionally infuriated) me. Then, after seeing oral exams done in person it hit me. All sorts of subjects have oral exams here (like statistics, chemistry, math… you name it). At one point I had a brain flash “The oral exam is a catechism” and then a lot of the other pieces fell into place and I found a key for understanding lots of things: The Catholic Church’s greatest contribution isn’t so much religious or political, it provides a model of organization that can be applied with only minor changes to all sorts of things. This is a very handy thing to have in a place where political systems (and borders) come and go at unexpected irregular intervals and I became a bit more sympathetic to the church.
I put this idea to a friend who’d been in the country longer than I had (lapsed catholic) and they thought about it for a second and then started making connections between Catholic hierarchy and the large organization she had worked for (and which I was familiar with).I would advise against studying these things like a subject you’ll be tested on, it’s more about collecting data points until a ‘eureka’ moment arrives.
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Here is a current social puzzle. I decided that my next book is going to be about class. When I say that, people react like I communicated something indecent. It is as if I announced that I am going to write a book about necrophilia and gather information through personal observations of the practice. I started wondering if this is about my accent. Do I pronounce the word in a way that makes it sound like something else? Do people react like this because they think I am of a lower class than they and it makes them uncomfortable, or because they think that I am of a higher class? Is it because in academia, it’s fashionable to pretend to be working class and they most certainly don’t? It happened several times already. People immediately look very uncomfortable and start looking sideways. Who knows? I have given up on trying to figure it out.
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“people react like I communicated something indecent”
Off the top of my head…. I’ve been away long enough that I don’t know to what extent that’s still true… class is a topic that makes Americans profoundly uncomfortable. This is why (in the past at least) so many people claimed to be middle class who clearly are not (it used to go both ways, people from both higher and lower classes claimed to be middle class).
Saying you want to look at it in a book is less like necrophilia and more like announcing you want to examine people’s toilets… while in use.
This comes back to one of the pardoxes of the American system that no one has really been able to solve. Participatory democracy requires (legal, political) equality as written into the founding documents while a capitalistic system requires inequality since improving one’s lot is the entire raison d’etre of participating in a capitalist system.
IIRC a few years ago I tried to establish some baseline categories for understanding class in America, and what I came up with was probably now outdated, but roughly…
Wealth Class (The one percent) – extreme wealth, mostly finance and/or tech or ‘old money’
Upper class – professionals, doctors, lawyers, university professors, support the arts, don’t use government services
Middle Class – senior office workers and middle management, small business owners
Working Class – supervised by middle class, the trades, qualify for government help
Lower “precarious” Class – fast food, cleaning, construction, often juggle different short term jobs, sometimes dependent on government help
Underclass – rarely employed for long, prone to drug abuse and other dysfunction, borderline or completely homeless, usually too chaotic to qualify for government help
With minority groups (apart from East Asians) you knock everything down a level so that minority middle class is more like working class…
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The most useful model I’ve run across breaks it down by the source of your income:
-Investment class (income is from investments)
-Salary class (gets paid by yearly contract, independent of how many hours worked)
-Wage class (gets paid by the hour)
-Welfare class (gets paid by government entitlements)These make up the majority of Americans. There’s a small, squishy fifth class of people with independent incomes from things they produce: who own and run non-landlord businesses (contractors, for example), people who make a living from their creative output and royalties (artists and writers for example), and people who make/grow things and sell them (farmers, craftsmen). This class is so small it has no political clout so for most purposes does not count.
Like any model, it breaks down at edge cases, but for gauging culture, attitude, social rules… surprisingly useful. There are of course education things that play into class that aren’t addressed here. But… it does circumvent some of the odd problems of classifying by income or net worth. Elementary teachers, for example, have masters’ degrees, lousy pay, and middle-class prestige (and it tends to be a job favored by bored wives of doctors and engineers where I live). They’re very tidily salary class: they tend to marry in the salary class, and have salary-class attitudes and aspirations, and obey salary-class social rules.
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Should add: independent operator class does not count for political or numerical purposes, but does tend to have its own sort of attitudes and social rules. My family has a lot of contractors, and the baseline approach to life is just… different. They’re successful, they dress middle class, they live in nice neighborhoods, and the way they operate is just completely different from salary-class people with the same income. And for some reason they all have boats. Probably that’s a regional thing 😉
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Absolutely. It’s clearly a painful issue. I’ve been researching, and all of the theory and criticism about class is from before 1986. Nobody has done any interest with it since then. The only research that has to do with class always goes into some other identity category: working-class African Americans, working-class gay men. Obviously, nobody is discussing upper-class gays or African Americans.
But look, I am not exempt. I read your class hierarchy and got sore over the idea that I am upper class. In my profession, that is almost as bad as being a conservative.
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This is… hilarious.
It’s probably because talking about class in the US is taboo. “Everybody is middle class” unless they’re on welfare or they’re Elon Musk. Everybody. It’s a religious belief.
But now I really, really want to know how you pronounce it.
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“I had in mind more the kind of effort you put into a crossword or a more casual long term collecting data points and then solving for X as it were.”
Oh, yeah, I totally do this. The problem is I don’t have a good way to reality-check most hypotheses. So, I observe people doing strange and incomprehensible things, I have weird and perplexing interactions with people, or I say or do something I thought was completely boring and innocuous and suddenly find myself embroiled in a tense situation where people are offended and my motives are being questioned… and I have no idea what just happened.
I don’t walk away from that whistling and never think on it again, of course. I jot it down in a notebook at the end of the day with all the detail I can recall, and then my brain kind of tinkers with it in the off-hours, holding it up to other incidents looking for patterns, coming up with theories, as one does. I have a LOT of theories, but very few answers. Sometimes my theories are wrong– I lack some key information. Sometimes my theories are right, but there’s a taboo involved and it is impossible to get confirmation because it’s illegal to talk about that thing, or because people are engaged in some kind of freaky mental double-bind about it and literally can’t think about it without reflexively attacking to protect some fragile core belief. You never get a sure answer about those. Once in a blue moon, I can run one by a sympathetic normie friend and get a positive confirmation: yes, that’s how it actually works (but also: how did you not know that? Sorry, it’s because I was raised by wolves).
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“got sore over the idea that I am upper class”
Well, class is a multi-vector thing…
income level and source of income (as indicated by ethyl) and taste (and some other things) all enter into it.
University professors inherently belong to what my mother used to call ‘the opera crowd’.
There’s also things like ‘reads for pleasure’ (and if so, what they read).
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Let’s take the women who post TikToks of themselves freaking out, throwing things around, and screaming like banshees. There’s been an avalanche of these videos. Almost invariably, you see women in them, posing inside very good, often quite expensive houses. What social class are they? They clearly behave like ghetto checks.
Or let’s take Candace Owens, who mispronounces every word that is longer than two syllables, yet she married into the British aristocracy and is very rich. On the other hand, we can look at Chirbes. Money-wise, he was much poorer than the freaking out women and definitely than Candace. But his sensibility was enormously more refined, and he had a valet.
What I’m saying is that there are many factors that go beyond money. In the USSR, everybody was equally poor aside from a small elite. But within that equal poverty, everybody knew extremely well what social class everybody was in.
I’m not interested in class as an expression of money ownership. I’m interested in different sensibilities.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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